Rhapsody

One of my goals for this year was to work through some of the wonderful books I purchased last year. The first book I thought I'd try is Ricky Tims' Rhapsody book. I love the quilts, but naturally my thoughts turned to making a jacket. Three other women have joined me on this quest. We get together every other week to share our progress and discuss problems, etc. If it weren't for them I'm not sure I'd have gotten this far!

If you've read the book or been to one of the Super Seminars you've heard about his pencil technique for transferring a quadrant drawing to make a pattern. Here's the drawing from the back of my jacket, complete with the decorative bits.

Here's a close up of the decorative bits. On his quilts Ricky appliques these portions, but on a jacket I wanted some thing scaled smaller and an expert at machine applique I am not! I love problem solving like this and came up with the idea of stencils.

Here are the freezer paper stencils ironed onto the red batik I had chosen. Instead of using liquid paints I decided on Shiva Paintsticks because I know they're opaque and so will work well on the red fabric. I auditioned 4 colors: antique (non-metallic) gold, metallic gold, non-metallic slate blue and metallic blue.

I opted for the metallic gold because I liked the way it worked with the gold batik I had selected.

I still need to buttonhole stitch in red around the large fused pieces. I'm also planning on stitching around all the stenciled areas, but I'm not sure if I want to use gold Sliver thread or navy blue. I'm tending towards the navy blue, but if you have a preference drop me a note!

Lisa